Why We Fall in Love With the Wrong People

We've all been taught how love is supposed to start.

Two people meet. There's a spark — that electric, can't-eat, can't-sleep, can't-stop-thinking-about-them feeling. Maybe they even can't stand each other at first, which somehow makes it more romantic. And that feeling is how they know. That's the signal. That's true love arriving.

It's a beautiful story. Many of us grew up on it. If you came up in the era of the great romantic comedies — the bookshop, the email, the big run through the city to catch someone before it's too late — you know exactly the feeling I mean.

Here's the problem. That feeling has a name, and it isn't love. It's limerence. And it was always, always going to fade.

It's not that the story is entirely wrong. It's that we built our whole approach to finding a partner around the one part of love that has an expiration date — and then we're shocked and heartbroken when the timer goes off. Some people leave good relationships because of it. Some people stay in terrible ones because of it. And even the people who get it right end up grieving something nobody warned them was temporary.

I'm Dr. Robin Dickinson. I'm a family physician, and for years I sat with people through their relationships — the start of them, the unraveling of them, and everything in between. Today I want to talk about why the way we fall in love sets us up to be unhappy, and what actually tells you whether someone is right for you. Because it is not the spark.

If you've seen my other videos, you've heard me mention the difference between limerence and love. I want to go deeper here, because this is one of the most useful things a person can understand before they hand someone their whole life.

Limerence is that early, obsessive, intoxicating phase. The racing thoughts. The way they seem perfect. The way an ordinary text from them can light up your entire day. It feels enormous. It feels like the most real thing that's ever happened to you.

But it's a chemical state. It's your Survival Brain running a reward loop — the same kind of loop that makes a slot machine hard to walk away from. It is intense by design, because for most of human history that intensity was useful: it bonded two people together long enough to get a vulnerable new human through its earliest years. The feeling is real. What it's measuring is not "this is the right person." What it's measuring is "this is a new person and my chemistry is on fire."

And here's the part nobody tells you: it has a shelf life. Limerence typically burns for somewhere between a few months and a couple of years, and then — for everyone, in every relationship, no exceptions — it fades. That is not a malfunction. That is the schedule. The chemical did its job and switched off, the way it was always going to.

Real love is what can grow in the space the spark leaves behind. It's quieter. It's a little boring compared to limerence, and I mean that as the highest compliment. It feels like safety instead of fireworks. It's the person who shows up, who's steady, who you actually like at seven in the morning. But because we were all trained to read fireworks as love, when the fireworks stop, people panic. They think the relationship died. When really, the relationship was just finally getting the chance to begin.
So we've got a temporary feeling that the culture has taught us to read as permanent truth. Watch what that does to people.

The first way it goes wrong: people chase the spark right past the people who'd actually be good for them.

I saw this in my practice more than I can count. Someone steady and kind and truly compatible would come along — and it wouldn't feel like enough. Not enough electricity. Not enough drama. So they'd let that person go and chase the one who made them feel that intoxicating, anxious, can't-look-away pull instead. And so often that pull wasn't chemistry telling them "this is your person." It was chemistry responding to someone unpredictable — someone who kept them a little off balance, a little uncertain, which is exactly the condition that keeps the reward loop firing hardest. They mistook anxiety for passion. They mistook intensity for depth.

I remember the pattern so clearly: a person sitting across from me, finally out of a relationship that had hurt them for years, able to see at last that the steady person they'd walked away from earlier had been the real thing all along. And what they always wanted to know was — why did I do that? Why did I leave the good one? They weren't foolish. They were doing exactly what they'd been taught: trust the spark. Follow the feeling. The feeling led them straight past the person who would have been kind to them for fifty years.

The second way it goes wrong is quieter, and it happens even to people who chose well.

Even when you pick a wonderful person — even in a relationship that is really good and built to last — the limerence still fades. It has to. And if no one ever told you that was coming, the fade feels like loss. Like the magic leaked out. Like maybe you settled, or maybe they changed, or maybe this just isn't "it" anymore. People can be in a perfectly good marriage and quietly mourn, wondering where the feeling went and whether its absence means something is wrong.

It doesn't. The disappointment when limerence fades can be profound — and it's almost entirely because nobody set the expectation. If you go in believing the spark is the whole point, then the spark fading reads as the end of the point. But if you understand that the spark was the opening act, you can actually be glad when the main event begins.

Here's where it gets practical. Because we don't just misread the spark — we go out of our way to manufacture it, and to hide everything that would tell us the truth.

Think about how we date. The nice restaurant. The careful outfit. The best stories, told at their most charming. Everyone is well rested, well dressed, on their best behavior, lit by candlelight. It is a performance — not a dishonest one necessarily, but a curated one. And it is almost perfectly designed to keep the spark going and to tell you nothing about who this person actually is.

Because anyone seems wonderful over a beautiful dinner. That's a low bar. The dinner is the pornography version of a relationship — engineered to look a certain way, edited down to the highlights, nothing like the daily reality.

You want to know who someone really is? Do something hard with them.

I always tell people: go volunteer together. Go build a trail. Spend a hot, sweaty afternoon doing actual work side by side, where something goes wrong, where you get tired and a little cranky, where there's a problem to solve and no candlelight to hide behind. Watch what happens. Does he get frustrated and take it out on the people around him? Does she stay kind when she's uncomfortable? Do you make a good team when it's not fun? Can you laugh when the plan falls apart? That afternoon will teach you more about a person than a hundred perfect dinners.

This is exactly what I'd want every young person to know before they start dating: the spark is the least reliable information you will ever get, delivered at the least reliable possible time. So don't make your big decisions inside it. Get to know people in real life — tired, stressed, bored, inconvenienced. Real life is where the truth lives.

I'll tell you what this looks like on the other side of it. My husband and I have been together a long time. And I promise you, what holds us together now is not the spark from when we met. It's a thousand ordinary, unglamorous things. It's him being the one who can stay calm and pull the splinter out when I get too shaky to do it. It's the way we've learned to work as a team when something goes wrong — and plenty has gone wrong. None of that is fireworks. All of it is love. And I would not trade the quiet, sturdy, real thing we have now for the most intense spark in the world.

The spark was never the prize. The spark was just the thing that got us in the door. What we built after it faded — that's the part you actually want.

So if you take one thing from this: the intensity of a feeling is not a measure of how right it is. Teach that to yourself. Teach it to your kids before they need it. A racing heart can mean "this is my person" or it can mean "this person is keeping me anxious" — and early on, you cannot tell the two apart from the inside. So don't trust the feeling to sort it out for you. Go build a trail. Watch how they are when it's hard. Let real life tell you the truth the spark never could.

That's the clinical truth about falling in love. And it's the same thing underneath everything I teach: when you understand how your own body and brain actually work, you stop being run by feelings you didn't choose and start making decisions that are actually yours.

If you want your kids to understand all of this — relationships, the brain, how to tell real connection from a chemical high, taught clinically and without shame — that's what Making More Humans is built on. You can explore the curriculum and watch your first lesson free at docrobinschool.com/truth.

I'll see you next time. Take good care.